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Who Were These Men?

Homer Bigart	Walter Cronkite	Gladwin Hill	Paul Manning
Robert Post	Andy Rooney	Denton Scott	William Wade

Homer Bigart Homer Bigart continued his career as a war correspondent through Korea and Vietnam. He won two Pulitzer Prizes as a print journalist. Initially with the New York Herald Tribune, he ended his career with the New York Times. It is not clear whether he flew again with the Eighth Air Force, although he wrote that he would have liked to, but he certainly put himself in dangerous positions throughout WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. (Eerily, Bigart had been named "least likely to return" by fellow Writing 69th member Robert Post.) Bigart died in 1991. Homer Bigart wrote two articles about the mission, in this one, written a couple of days after the mission, he wrote: A mission to Germany is a nasty experience. Apart from the very real danger to life and limb, there is the acute discomfort of enduring sub-zero temperatures for hours at a stretch and taking air through an oxygen mask. The altitude can affect your sinews, your kidneys, even the fillings of your teeth. You are very tired when you return. If you are a delayed-reaction type, you are likely to feel slightly under par for a couple of days. I must be crazy, but I should like to go again. He wrote this despite knowing that there was a good chance that Post was dead. Return to top of page Walter Cronkite Walter Cronkite is the most famous of The Writing 69th. Initially with the United Press, he moved to CBS after the war and gained fame as a CBS news anchor. Of his war experiences, he is characteristically humble. People take a look at my record and it sounds great. I'm embarrassed when I'm introduced for speeches and somebody takes a CBS handout and reads it, because it makes me sound like some sort of hero: the battle of the North Atlantic, the landing in Africa, the beachhead on D day, dropping with the 101st Airborne, the Battle of the Bulge. Personally, I feel I was an overweening coward in the war. I was scared to death all the time. I did everything possible to avoid getting into combat. Except the ultimate thing of not doing it. I did it. But the truth is that I did everything only once. It didn't take any great courage to do it once. If you go back and do it a second time; knowing how bad it is, that's courage. (Look Magazine, 11/17/70) A story by Cronkite appeared in the New York Times on February 27th. He opened his story this way: American Flying Fortresses have just come back from an assignment to hell; a hell 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire, of crippled Fortresses and burning German fighter planes, of parachuting men and others not so lucky. I have just returned with a Flying Fortress crew from Wilhelmshaven. (he continued) Actually the first impression of a daylight bombing mission is a hodge-podge of disconnected scenes. Things like bombs falling past you from the formation above, a crippled bomber with smoke pouring from one engine thousands of feet below. A Focke-Wulf peeling off somewhere above and plummeting down shooting its way through the formation. Return to top of page Gladwin Hill Gladwin Hill worked for the Associated Press from 1936 to 1944. A Harvard alum (like Robert Post), Hill worked for New York Times bureau in Los Angeles after the war. He wrote books on California politics and the environment. He died in 1992. Hill described the mission this way in an article that appeared in the New York Times the day after the raid: It was thrilling. Yet at the same time it was strangely prosaic in the business-like efficiency with which it was executed. Return to top of page Paul Manning Paul Manning worked with CBS Radio under Edward Murrow. Although he missed the mission on February 26, 1943, he flew other missions with the Eighth Air Force, including one on October 9th of 1943. After the war he wrote a book called Hirohito, The War Years. He also worked as a speech writer for Nelson Rockefeller. He died in 1995. Return to top of page Robert Post Robert Perkins Post was a Harvard man from a well-to-do family. Post's ancestors included a Civil War hero and Indian fighter. His family was well-connected and he knew Franklin Roosevelt personally. He had been the New York Times White House correspondent in the mid-thirties and then left to work in the London bureau. He was there through the Battle of Britain. When Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland in May of 1941, Robert Post had the byline on the lead story in the New York Times. After Post was reported lost, an officer at the 44th bomb group wrote the following: During the ten days he was here, Post won the confidence of all men and officers. They recognized his sincerity and his courage, for they constantly go through the same dangers themselves and they know the odds. He came at a time when the group had been badly shot up, when our losses had been heavy, when it seemed few people appreciated what they were suffering. Bob Post got close to our men. They poured out their story to him and felt his purpose was to help them win the war. It encouraged them to have the feeling that the people of the United States would be given a true picture of what they were trying to do and what must be done at home if democracy is to survive. Return to top of page Andy Rooney Andy Rooney, of course, is best known for his humorous commentaries on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Besides his books of humor, he also collaborated on two books regarding his experiences in World War II. One was a history of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and the other was called Air Gunner. The title is apt because the military journalists did their share of fighting. Other Stars and Stripes correspondents besides Rooney flew as well. One flew twenty missions. Another died on a mission. Much more recently, Rooney wrote a book on his experiences called My War. After the mission, Andy Rooney wrote these words for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes: Peeling out of the sun came shining silver German fighter planes, diving at one bomber in the formation and disappearing below the cloud banks as quickly as they had come. They seemed tiny, hardly a machine of destruction, and an impossible target. From that time until three and one-half hours later, when we were half way home, no one had to look far to see a German fighter. Return to top of page Denton Scott Denton Scott missed the mission on February 26, 1943, but flew shortly thereafter on a raid on France. He was the most prolific writer of the group. After the war he wrote non-fiction, novels, cookbooks, travel books, and many award-winning children's books. He died in 1995. Scott flew on a mission a few weeks later over Lorient, France. This is how he described it: You are moving at several hundred miles an hour, and things are coming at you at several hundred miles an hour, and you dearly love life and your wife back in the States, and the sooner you get the hell out of there the better it will suit you. Return to top of page William Wade The day of the mission, William Wade's plane developed engine trouble and turned back. He filed a brief story which ran under the headline "This Local Boy Didn't Make Good" in his college-town Minneapolis newspaper. Wade later accompanied a B-26 bomber on a D-day mission. He missed a chance to fly on an RAF bombing mission when he lost a coin toss with fellow INS correspondent Lowell Bennett. Bennett's plane was shot down and he spent 18 months in a German prison camp. After the war, William Wade earned a degree from the London School of Economics and later was an editor for the Voice of America.

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